The Death Of Big-city Hutches: Shed No Tears For The Cottontails

July 4, 1986|By Ellen Goodman, Washington Post Writers Group

BOSTON — Forgive me if I do not mourn the passing of the Playboy clubs. I wasn't at the closing ceremonies in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. I had no key to turn in, you see, no souvenir ears to take home for nibbling. I had no nostalgia for titillations past.

If there is an afterlife, I hope that the comedian in the Chicago club is right: ''I envision a bunny heaven where bunnies are served drinks by middle- aged businessmen in funny little costumes.'' For eternity.

Over a life span of 26 years, a million men were members of Playboy clubs and 25,000 women encased themselves in the corsetted push-up costumes. They learned to do the bunny dips and get the bunny tips. But the only thing that remained unchanged on closing night was the age of the woman on Hugh Hefner's arm. She was 22.

I don't know exactly who killed this golden bunny. The last big-city hutches closed because they were no longer ''hip.'' (Only three franchises keep the logo alive in more middle America.) But I have a list of suspects, three of them from different backgrounds with different values.

First on any list, certainly Hefner's list, is his favorite all-time enemy, ''the authoritarian true-believers,'' the fundamentalists on a comeback trail. Second are men who finally outgrew the adolescent image of women as cottontails. Third are the consumers who left the Playboy market behind, ''graduating'' from the risque to the raunchy.

They make an odd threesome -- these suspects -- and yet, it seems that they often form the triangular team that debates sexual politics today. They are behind the closing ceremonies of the Playboy clubs. They are arguing over the removal of magazines at convenience stores. They are rebutting and re- rebutting the report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography.

What labels, however simplistic, can we apply to such a trio? Puritans. Humanists. X-rated Sexual Consumers.

In the last 30 years attitudes toward sexual values have gravitated toward these distant corners. In one corner, people rally around an external standard, the biblical arbiter of sexual dos and don'ts. In another, people seek some internal standard of love, erotic and caring, as a guideline for sexual intimacy. In a third and darkest corner are those who have no standard at all beyond exploitation.

Is it too much of an exaggeration to say that one group would dress those former bunnies in purdah, another in independence, while a third would strip them down to genitals?

The most unsettled corner of this triangle is one that holds those Humanists (for want of a better word) who see caring, at least mutual consent, as the basic standard by which to judge sexual behavior. We are, for the most part, people trying to avoid both exploitation and repression. For the most part, we are successful in private life. But in public life we find ourselves pushed into uncomfortable affinity with Puritans and X-rated Sexual Consumers. When 4,500 7-Eleven stores removed Playboy and Penthouse, I for one could not work up any outrage at their disappearance. If I no longer passed a man idly scanning pictures of naked women on my way to the toothpaste shelf, I couldn't rue that as a loss of liberty. Yet I know that I do not share the same goals or values as the boycotters. I surely do not approve the tactics of the pornography commission, whose letter intimidated these stores.

As for the commission report itself, those of us who abhor pornography because it exploits any standard of caring are uncomfortable with the absolutist First Amendment defense of Sexual Consumers. But we are also uncomfortable in alliance with Puritans who find dangerous smut in Ulysses.

Many of us had hoped the commission would draw an acceptable line between the erotic and the pornographic, between license and banning. We hoped they would blaze some path between free speech and violent smut. Instead, we are left standing uneasily in a corner.

The Playboy clubs opened in an era when TV still showed married couples in twin beds. Few of us want to return to the control of Puritans. Nor do we regard X-rated Sexual Consumers as progressives. From our beleaguered corner, we still hope that pornography will end the way the Playboy Clubs ended: There just weren't enough customers anymore.